Web
pricing factoid from Rian van der Merwe: "Facebook
says that they have over 800 million active users,
and that 'more than 50% of our active users log
on to Facebook in any given day.' So let’s, for
argument’s sake, say that about 500 million users
visit Facebook every day. If each of those users
paid Facebook $2 per year, the revenue would cover
the cost of running the site. Just increase that to
$3 per year, or 25c per month, and you suddenly have
$1.5B revenue per year (or roughly $500M profit, based
on Facebook’s rough estimate of their operating
costs). Let’s be clear about this: it’s the cost
of one coffee per year."

Benjamin Mako Hill: Wide
Scream. (Ideas? Best I can think of is to turn
a 1920x1200 by 90 degrees, and use that for most things and
the laptop screen for stuff that has to be wide.)

Thomas Philippon: Has
the finance industry become less efficient?
(But, I wonder, is it fair to talk about
"efficiency" of what's really just economic sin-eating?
Imagine that you put your retirement savings
into Enron, or pork bellies, or
Las Vegas real estate, or whatever, and you lose
most of it--the guilt over your bad decisions is a
non-financial cost to you. Now imagine that you gave
the money to whatever financial wizards are currently
"the smartest guys in the room" and they lose it.
What could you have done? Intangibly you're better
off and all they take for it is money.)

I've heard that in the German Navy of the
Kaiser's time, the enlisted sailors's
diet was a health hazard until they
established the simple rule that the officers
eat what the sailors do, after they're done. Finland
does something like that for education.